A Navy SEAL Invented the Suspension Trainer. An MIT Engineer Found Its Blind Spot.

The suspension trainer has had a single-anchor design for over 20 years. It works. But it also caps the exercises you can do by physics alone.

Chris Bennett

Aug 24, 2026 · 5 min read

The Invention

In 1997, a Navy SEAL named Randy Hetrick ripped apart a jiu-jitsu belt and sewed it into a pair of nylon straps. He was deployed, far from any gym, and he needed a way to train with nothing but a door frame and his own body weight.

That improvisation became the TRX. Within a decade, it was standard equipment in military bases, physical therapy clinics, and commercial gyms on every continent. The design was simple and it worked. Two handles hanging from a single anchor point above your head. Rows, push-ups, planks, pistol squats. You could fold the whole system into a bag and train anywhere on the planet.

The TRX earned every bit of that success. It brought suspension training out of military barracks and put it in living rooms. For twenty years, every suspension trainer that followed used the same architecture: one anchor, two straps, handles at the bottom.

Nobody questioned the single-anchor design. It was the default, the way a barbell has two ends and a treadmill has a belt. Twenty years is a long time for an entire product category to go unexamined.

The Problem With One Anchor

Then an MIT graduate named Remy did. He had been training with gymnastic rings and suspension straps during years of travel, hauling them from country to country. He loved the concept. The portability, the simplicity, the fact that any tree branch or door frame became a full gym.

But he kept running into the same wall.

Some exercises do not work when both handles hang from one point overhead. Try a proper ring dip on a TRX. The handles swing inward because they share an anchor. Your elbows track toward each other instead of back. The deeper you go, the more the geometry fights your shoulders.

Wide-grip rows hit the same wall. So do chest flyes. Face pulls at width. Anything that asks your hands to spread apart under tension fights the physics of a single anchor pulling both straps together. The straps are not working against each other. They are converging.

This is not a flaw in the TRX. It is a structural limit of the single-anchor category. Every trainer built on that architecture shares it.

What Gymnasts Already Knew

Gymnasts solved this problem over a hundred years ago. They hung their rings from two separate points, spaced apart. That geometry is why gymnastic rings allow muscle-ups, iron crosses, and deep ring dips that no single-anchor trainer can replicate. When each hand moves independently from its own overhead point, the exercise possibilities multiply.

The problem with gymnastic rings is everything else. They weigh over two pounds. They need a sturdy overhead beam. They are not portable. You will not toss a pair of wooden rings into your backpack on the way to the airport.

The Redesign

Remy's redesign was straightforward. Take the portability and speed of a suspension trainer. Give it the dual-anchor geometry of gymnastic rings. Strip the weight down to under a pound.

The result is the Nanobars V2. Two independent handles, each with its own 16-foot strap, that wrap around any tree branch, pull-up bar, or door frame in seconds. The handles switch between stable mode for push-ups and rotating mode for ring-style pulling work. The whole system weighs 0.79 pounds and ships in a pouch that fits in your pocket.

The handles are knurled aluminum with a 31mm grip diameter. That is the same spec as an Olympic barbell. Load rating is 600 pounds. Numbered webbing on each strap lets you match strap lengths in seconds without counting.

The Exercise Gap: One Anchor vs. Two

Here is what opens up when each handle hangs from its own point.

This is not an exhaustive list. The count reaches 30 before you run out of common movements. The full exercise library is on the product page.

Where the TRX Still Wins

This is not a knock on the TRX HOME 2. For guided bodyweight circuits and physical therapy progressions, it remains excellent. It has the deepest exercise library of any single-anchor system, and two decades of trainer-built content support it. If your training is circuits and you value that library, the TRX is still the right pick.

But the single-anchor architecture caps the exercise selection by physics, not by design choice. No software update or new strap material fixes a geometry problem.

The Price Gap

The Nanobars V2 costs $49. A TRX HOME 2 costs $239.95. A pair of wooden gymnastic rings runs about $35 to $50, but they weigh over two pounds and need a permanent overhead anchor.

$49 buys the dual-anchor geometry, the 0.79-pound travel weight, and the rotating-handle mechanism. It does not buy a guided app or a streaming workout library. The Nanobars V2 ships with a printed exercise guide and leaves programming to you.